Top economic advisers to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev accused him of indecisiveness and inconsistency Sunday and said the Soviet economy will get even worse as a result of his policies. Among the 12 leading economists who published their views in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda was Stanislav S. Shatalin, a member of Gorbachev's Presidential Council and the author of the "500-Day Plan" for rapid economic reform that Gorbachev and Soviet lawmakers recently rejected.

Top economic advisers to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev accused him of indecisiveness and inconsistency Sunday and said the Soviet economy will get even worse as a result of his policies. Among the 12 leading economists who published their views in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda was Stanislav S. Shatalin, a member of Gorbachev's Presidential Council and the author of the "500-Day Plan" for rapid economic reform that Gorbachev and Soviet lawmakers recently rejected.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Tuesday retreated sharply from a radical program to transform the Soviet Union's state-owned, centrally planned economy into a new system based on market forces and private entrepreneurship.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Tuesday retreated sharply from a radical program to transform the Soviet Union's state-owned, centrally planned economy into a new system based on market forces and private entrepreneurship.

The top economic adviser to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has left his post after writing a public letter accusing Gorbachev of criminal acts to prop up "a regime in its death throes." A spokesman said Friday that economic adviser Nikolai Petrakov was out of a job, joining a growing list of reformers who have left Gorbachev's inner circle or been fired after Gorbachev began using more hard-line tactics. It was not clear whether Petrakov had resigned or been removed.

The co-author of the radical "500-Day Plan" for a transition to a market economy in the Soviet Union resigned in protest Wednesday because President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has decided to implement a more conservative plan.

When Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev appointed his new, 10-member Presidential Council on Saturday, half of them were expected--the country's foreign minister, the defense minister, the chairman of the State Planning Committee, a close ally from the Communist Party's Politburo and the head of the KGB, the Soviet security agency.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's economic adviser said Thursday that he hopes lawmakers around the country will agree by Oct. 1 on a radical reform plan to sell off most of the Soviet economy into private hands and decentralize decision-making within 500 days. "The time has come when we must choose," Nikolai Y. Petrakov told a news conference he had called to explain the status of competing proposals for transition to a market-oriented economy after weeks of bickering.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is ready to use his sweeping new powers, which enable him to rule by decree, to begin the development of a market economy in the Soviet Union and to undertake other radical reforms, his chief economic adviser said Tuesday. Nikolai Y.

Sixteen months ago the Soviet Communist Party lost its constitutionally guaranteed monopoly on power, for more than seven decades the arbitrary source of its legitimacy. Now the party--weakened by mass defections and internally divided, with its most conservative elements fighting desperate rear-guard actions to delay reforms--faces its most formidable challenge so far.

In the hilly, automobile-producing region of Udmurtia, 700 miles east of Moscow, the talk this week has been about proclaiming sovereignty, or perhaps even an "Udmurt People's Republic." In recent weeks, the Tatars who live in the Volga basin have declared their land sovereign, as have the Karelians near the Finnish border and the people of the Komi region of the Far North.

Critics of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's economic reforms are increasing political instability in the country and eroding international confidence in the Soviet Union with their attacks, a key Gorbachev adviser said Thursday. Abel Aganbegyan, who compiled the reform package that Gorbachev will formally present to Soviet lawmakers today, accused Boris N. Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, of endangering the country's economic recovery with his denunciations of the Gorbachev program.